Aviation League Restores 1st Of 40 Arrows Across Wyoming
There are arrows across the west. They are made of cement and used to be painted bright yellow to guide aviators. It was the only form of navigation they had at the time.
Below: A local landowner west of Cheyenne grants permission to restore an arrow on his property. He begins the work himself.
Giant concrete arrows, up to 70 feet long, were built across the United States in the 1920s by the U.S. Post Office and Bureau of Lighthouses to guide transcontinental airmail pilots.
Below: Clearing the old cement is important before painting. Some of the old cement is cracked in places. They will do what they can.
Visit the Wyoming Aviation League Facebook Page for more photos and videos on the restoration of this first arrow. (At this link).
Below: These arrows used to be bright yellow, so they could be seen from the air. There were also manned beacon towers for night flying. The old beacon tower and building are no longer at this site. But there is evidence of where they once stood.
Wyoming's portion of the Salt Lake to Omaha (SL-O) Airway originally featured 40 beacons and concrete directional arrows spaced roughly 10 miles apart along southern Wyoming.
The Wyoming Aviation Heritage League has begun the restoration of these arrows across Wyoming, with the first one being cleared and painted. 39 to go.
This one was just west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and, as you might expect, it points directly at the Cheyenne airport.
A bucket list item for many regional private pilots is to fly these arrows today. But they are hard to find. So the league is restoring them for historic reasons as well as making them more visible for pilots today who want to retrace that old route.
ONE DOWN - 39 TO GO!
The Wyoming Aviation Heritage League is also working toward preserving other icons of the past, like the old terminal in Cheyenne, which it hopes to turn into a museum along with a restaurant and other attractions inside.
The site in Medicine Bow, Wyoming also has an arrow. But its building and tower still stand. Scroll down to see and watch the video.
This humble little grass airstrip helped shape America.
In the video below, you will see what this important airport looks like today.
Medicine Bow has always been a humble little town. But at one point it was an important stop on America's first coast-to-coast railway, its first coast-to-coast highway and the nation's first airmail service.
The town was even made famous in the best-selling novel, The Virginian.
As if the Pony Express wasn't daring enough, next came the brave and slightly foolhardy men who first took the mail to the sky.
Using old and not-so-reliable World War I surplus planes, the United States Postal Service was determined to figure out how to fly mail from coast to coast, saving up to a month of travel time if they were successful.
At the little Medicine Bow airport, there is a cement arrow pointing the flyers to their next stop. These arrows were placed across the nation for the pilots to see and follow from the air.
The only way to navigate was to fly low and follow the Union Pacific railroad tracks across the country and across Wyoming. The video below will show you what sort of airports they were looking for.
Cheyenne, Medicine Bow, Rock Springs, and other towns along the route were refueling and repair points on the map.
Many planes crashed, for any on a long list of reasons. Some men died.
The book "Wyoming Air Mail Pioneers" chronicles the men who were legends, heroes, and celebrities of their time. They had several stories written about them in newspapers across America.
"Wyoming Air Mail Pioneers" was co-written by Starley Talbott and Michael E. Kassel, with a foreword by local Cheyenne flight school owner Doniv Feltner of Wings of Wyoming.
Ask for it at your local Wyoming bookstore or order it online.
VIDEO OF MEDICINE BOW AIRPORT.
WOW - Amaizing Cheyenne Air Show 2026
Gallery Credit: Glenn Woods
